Long-lost article by Obama's dad surfaces

Barack Obama’s dad was such an important but absent figure in his life that he devoted his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” to the search for details about his father’s life and how the quest helped forge a son’s identity.

Now, a long-forgotten essay written 43 years ago by Obama’s father has surfaced, and its contents reveal much — not only about the senior Obama’s grasp of economic theory but also about the iconoclastic politics that, his son would later write, sent him into the spiral of career disappointment that concluded with his death in 1982 in his native Kenya.

Story Continued Below

Parts of the article, titled “ Problems Facing Our Socialism,” have been making the rounds on several small blogs over the past week, but Politico.com is now, for the first time, reproducing the entire piece in its original form.

The scholarly eight-page paper, credited to “Barak H. Obama,” is never mentioned in “Dreams From My Father,” nor has the candidate discussed it in any of his many public speeches. (Politico brought the article to his campaign’s attention late last week, but aides did not respond to a request for comment from Obama.)

The paper’s substance, though, offers insight into the mind and the political trajectory of a man described by his son largely through his emotional life, his family and his traditions.

Published in the esoteric East Africa Journal in 1965, the year after Kenyan President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta took power and the country declared independence from British rule, the paper takes a gently mocking tone to the Kenyatta government’s key, controversial statement of economic policy, titled “African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya.”

See Also

Obama senior’s journal article repeatedly asks what the Kenyan government means by “African Socialism,” as distinct from Soviet-style communism, and concludes that the new phrase doesn’t mean much.

Elements of Obama’s argument now seem prescient, others deeply dated, but his central aim — particularly in the context of the heady early days of African independence — was moderate and conciliatory.

“The question is how are we going to remove the disparities in our country, such as the concentration of economic power in Asian and European hands, while not destroying what has already been achieved and at the same time assimilating these groups to build one country,” Obama senior wrote.

When he wrote the paper, he was in Nairobi and working on a never-completed Harvard doctoral dissertation, according to his brief biography in the journal.

Two years earlier, he had divorced his wife, who was raising his son in Hawaii.

But even back in Nairobi, the elder Obama felt free to mock the Kenyan government.

“Maybe it is better to have something perfunctorily done than none at all!” he concluded.

That’s the attitude, his son would later find, that took him from a career in the Kenyan governing class to “a small job at the Water Department” and then to unemployment and alcohol.

Obama senior, who returned to Kenya after his Harvard years, soon became a public critic of Kenyatta’s growing favoritism toward the Kikuyu tribe, over Obama’s Luos.

“Word got back to Kenyatta that the Old Man was a troublemaker, and he was called in to see the president. According to the stories, Kenyatta said to the Old Man that because he could not keep his mouth shut, he would not work again until he had no shoes on his feet,” Obama quoted his half-sister as telling him.

Obama wrote that his father was rehabilitated after Kenyatta’s death in 1978 but was by then broken and embittered.

Obama senior’s 1965 paper, however, brims with confidence and optimism.

The article, with a loaded term in the title and a casual discussion of socialism, communism and nationalization, has raised the hackles of some anti-Obama conservatives who have been discussing it online.